The patient was in grave condition. Once the epitome of Puerto Rican cool, an icon of tropical Modernism from the moment it was completed in 1958, by the mid-1990s the venerable La Concha hotel had been shuttered, abandoned and left to rot. Yards of its interior detailing had been stripped away. The cabana wing had been torn down. A complete demolition was scheduled to begin when, following vocal protests from local architects, historians and the community at large, the enterprising folk at Renaissance Hotels decided to give the old building a new life.

Originally designed by Osvaldo Toro and Miguel Ferrer, with an eccentric but utterly lovable seashell-shaped restaurant by Mario Salvatori, La Concha was a beautifully massed, expertly sited, vividly inventive building perfectly in sync with its time. Closely attuning the hotel to its sun-swept setting, the architects created deep-shading overhangs, open corridors, windows and doors that gave onto lush interior courtyards and provided cross ventilation, and a beautifully lacy quiebrasol (their take on a brise-soleil) for further modulation of the light and heat. The hotel featured vaulted ceilings that capped poolside cabanas, a sea of white marble in its interiors and Salvatori's whimsical mollusk of a restaurant floating in a reflecting pool that seemed to merge into the infinity of the ocean beyond.

Despite a number of additions and subtractions over the years, the basic bones—but only the bones—of this impressive building were still, fortunately, intact when architect José R. Marchand and designer Jorge Rosselló were brought on board to rescue and reinvent the hotel. For Marchand, the project was, he says, "the experience of a career." Like many Puerto Ricans, he had grown up loving La Concha and was eager to see what he could do not only to preserve what was worth preserving but also to address elements that changes in taste and hotel standards showed needed improvement.

"We were lucky to have all of the original drawings," the architect recalls. "They helped us to see back in time, before ugly corruptions had been made to the footprint. They also helped us to retrieve pieces of the hotel—like the spiral staircase in the lobby and the cabanas—that had been destroyed."

Probably the largest single adjustment Marchand made to the building was to open up the lobby, in a more sweeping way, to the pool, which is set within a large, verdant courtyard. "In the original hotel, the lobby overlapped with a parking deck, so there was a wall that impeded your experience of the outdoors. We made the lobby and the recreational area flow more smoothly." Large floor-to-ceiling doors now stand open nearly all year long, supplying light, fresh air, fragrance from blossoms—in short, Puerto Rican balminess at its very best.

Marchand and Rosselló worked closely together from day one on La Concha and sought to restore the hotel's original cleansing white palette while at the same time putting their own stamp on the interiors. The lobby is almost entirely clad in Calacatta marble, with color used as witty punctuation marks. Over the bar, which stands in the center of the lobby, the team designed an undulating, sound-muffling ceiling and upholstered it in vivid red fabric; its surface was then pierced with narrow slits through which computerized lights subtly change colors over the course of an evening. Elsewhere in the lobby, Marchand and Rosselló created shadow capitals to finish off structural columns; these shallow, saucer-like indentations in the ceiling contain lights (green in this case) that wash down over the columns. And while the lobby's crisp contemporary furniture is rigorously all-white, the space is divided—and subtly brightened—by vitrines displaying Sandra Golbert's fiber art, row upon row of delicate silk ribbons suspended from rods.

The overall effect is at once sleek and witty, contemporary without being clinical. A similar discipline characterizes the team's approach to the guest rooms, where Rosselló had to fight the pragmatic hoteliers to extend the white palette. "We wanted to have the feeling of the lobby continue into the rooms," he explains. "Also, with the new floor-to-ceiling windows, we wanted nothing to compete with the sea. We wanted the whole experience to feel as transparent as possible."

The most dashing expression of the hotel's verve is certainly la concha itself, Salvatori's shell of a restaurant, which, though structurally sound, had lost much of its luster. Over the years the shell had been linked to the hotel with ugly connectors. Marchand and Rosselló replaced these with lighter bridges modeled on the originals; here, too, they used color, in the glazing, that sets a decidedly festive tone. In the interior of the restaurant, their boldest gesture was to remove all overhead lighting; the shell now emerges, pure and unbroken, as the piece of sculpture that it always was. Lit from below by standing lamps that look like enormous artichokes with Murano glass petals and anchored by a rug in a watery palette,the restaurant is like a great oversize treasure that has improbably washed up on shore.

"In the past, La Concha was a happy place," Rosselló says. "You always felt free there. Our goal was to bring back that sense of freedom, to wake Puerto Rico's most beloved sleeping beauty from her long and damaging sleep."

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